A few weeks ago, Novell and Red Hat jointly fended off a patent infringement suit thrown their way by a patent troll. The patent in question more or less came down to the concept of virtual desktops - and thanks to Groklaw, several people helped in finding cases of prior art. The most interesting one of all? A carefully restored and working Amiga 1000 demonstrated to the judge and jury.

Oh, and I can't remember the last time I had to install a driver in linux.

You don't really play with non-mainstream hardware then I take it. Good for you, but don't think it's the same for every case. Things can get really messy if the driver exists as open, but is not part of mainstream -want an example? dgap.